Institutes hire IT professionals to train faculty
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 07 April 2010, 23:19 IST
Printer Print Email Email
Institutes hire IT professionals to train faculty
New Delhi: To make the education more students friendly, engineering colleges in India are collaborating with some of the IT giants like Tata, Wipro and Synopsis to train their faculties in subjects like cryptography. As part of this collaborative effort, complex subjects like cryptography are being taught in many colleges through treasure hunts. Snakes and ladders are being used to teach the applications of low and high pass filters, and word games demonstrate the working of reaction turbines. Institutes like IIT Powai, Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University (JNTU), Andhra Pradesh, Visves-waraiah Technological University (VTU), Belgaum, Anna University in Tamil Nadu and ITS Ghaziabad are some of those partnering with the IT companies to have their faculty trained. "Students were often not serious in classrooms, but with the adoption of new teaching methods, we have seen considerable interest. Students also tend to retain a topic much longer," says Abhay Bansal, professor of computer science at IPS Ghaziabad. Bansal is a faculty member involved in a training programme dubbed Mission10X, launched by Wipro to train nearly 10,000 teachers this year. Synopsys, chip design company, has also unveiled a section called SEER Akademi to train teachers. "The demand for electrical and electronics engineers in India is estimated to reach five lakh by 2015. Our initiative aims to fill the supply gap," says Srikanth Jadcherla, CEO of SEER Akademi. The company has reworked the microelectronics curriculum of colleges like Bhubaneswar Institute of Technology, Chitkara University (Punjab) and North East Technical Education Society in Assam, JNTU and VTU. TCS has also launched an Academic Interface Programme. Some of the lesser-known institutes are finding such training particularly useful in raising confidence levels in students. Colleges like the Meerut Institute of Engineering and Arya Institute of Engineering and Technology at Jaipur have adopted such programmes. "Top IT companies demand soft skills at placement sessions, and such training programmes help us build these in students," says a teacher at a Meerut-based institute.

siliconindia